In Canarsie, Brooklyn, people were organized against the blacks based on protecting their money and children. Because the white people could not leave as a result of the house mortgages, they punished the blacks how they saw fit, according to their sense of right and wrong.
The case study in Canarsie is somewhat similar to the one in East Village during the hippie movement. Tensions from differences in race and class arose; in the East Village, the Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and elderly people were connected in being working class, but the youth from suburbia were white and chose to act “poor”, seemingly mocking the original residents of East Village, while in Canarsie, because blacks that made less money than the white people originally living in Canarsie resided with the them, physical violence ensued.
The vigilantism that the Italians were using was similar to the self-help initiatives like homesteading that the Puerto Ricans started to improve their neighborhood in a time of urban decay. Because the government wasn’t performing the expectations that the Italians and Puerto Ricans thought they would, the Italians didn’t rely on the government to protect them from theft, and they made their own informal justice systems. The Canarsians lost trust in the “state’s ability to detect and punish” because they thought the state was too compassionate, giving the criminals their rights and allowing them to go back to the streets, while the Puerto Ricans lost trust in the city’s ability to take care of the disinvestment, augmented poverty, drug system, and crime that was happening in the 1970s. Organizations like The Concerned Citizens of Canarsie and backlash activists took matters into their own hands; Tenant Interim Lease Program allowed tenants to take care of city-owned apartment buildings, and then own them as cooperatives.
It is interesting to see how the white people in Canarsie wanted to lose their rights in exchange for a safer neighborhood and schools. It reminds me of the debate between privacy and stricter surveillance for the United States to prevent terrorist attacks.
The meetings between the white and black Canarsians seemed to be not effective enough for making compromises, which reminds me of how the U.N. takes a long time making decisions.
It seems that revenge is universal, from the times of Hannibal’s “eye-for-an-eye” to modern-day New York City, but forgiveness and compassion need to occur in order for the world to change.
